Switching to systemd on Debian jessie

2014-05-20

It seems like everyone is embracing systemd these days. It’s been in Fedora since 2011 and it’s already in the RHEL 7 release candidate. Arch Linux and Gentoo have it as well. Debian got on board with the jessie release (which is currently in testing).

Switching from old SysVinit to systemd in Debian jessie is quite simple. For the extremely cautious system administrators, you can follow Debian’s guide and test systemd before you make the full cutover.

However, I’ve had great results with making the jump in one pass:

apt-get update
apt-get install systemd systemd-sysv
reboot

After you reboot, you might notice /sbin/init still hanging out in your process list: